Bested NSA with low-cost tools

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WASHINGTON — Intelligence officials investigating how Edward J. Snowden gained access to roughly 1.7 million of the country’s most highly classified documents say they have determined that he used inexpensive and widely available software to “scrape” the National Security Agency’s networks, and he kept at it even after he was briefly challenged by agency officials.

Using “Web crawler” software designed to search, index, and back up a website, Snowden “scraped data out of our systems” while he went about his day job, according to a senior intelligence official.

“We do not believe this was an individual sitting at a machine and downloading this much material in sequence,” the official said. The process, he added, was “quite automated.”

The findings are striking because the NSA’s mission includes protecting the nation’s most sensitive military and intelligence computer systems from cyberattacks, especially the sophisticated attacks that emanate from Russia and China. Snowden’s “insider attack,” by contrast, was hardly sophisticated and should have been easily detected, investigators found.

Moreover, Snowden succeeded nearly three years after the WikiLeaks disclosures, in which military and State Department files, of far less sensitivity, were taken using similar techniques.

Snowden had access to the NSA’s complete files because he was working as a technology contractor for the agency in Hawaii, helping to manage the agency’s computer systems in an outpost that focuses on China and North Korea.

A Web crawler, also called a spider, automatically moves from website to website, following links embedded in each document, and can be programmed to copy everything in its path.

Snowden appears to have set the parameters for the searches, including which subjects to look for and how deeply to follow links to documents and other data on the NSA’s internal networks.

Among the materials prominent in the Snowden files are the agency’s shared “wikis,” databases to which intelligence analysts, operatives, and others contributed their knowledge.

Some of that material indicates that Snowden “accessed” the documents. But experts say the documents may well have been downloaded not by him but by the program acting on his behalf.

Agency officials insist that if Snowden had been working from NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Md., he almost certainly would have been caught.

But because he worked at an agency outpost that had not yet been upgraded with modern security measures, his copying of data raised few alarms.

In at least one instance when he was questioned, Snowden provided what were later described to investigators as legitimate-sounding explanations for his activities: As a systems administrator he was responsible for conducting routine network maintenance. That could include backing up the computer systems and moving information to local servers, investigators were told.

Snowden learned something critical about the NSA’s culture: While the organization built enormously high electronic barriers to keep out foreign invaders, it had rudimentary protections against insiders.

Through his lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, Snowden did not specifically address the government’s theory of how he obtained the files.